Why Caribbean Cyber Risks Can Cascade Across Global Supply Chains

Summary

Commentary argues that rapid exploitation and annual supplier reviews leave Caribbean organizations exposed, with risks cascading through shared platforms. It recommends continuous assurance, faster remediation measurement, segmentation, and monitoring federated access.

Key points

• The article says ransomware disrupted Curaçao's Tax and Customs Administration in July 2025, taking counter services, the call center, and internal processes offline for more than a week.
• It says the Joint Court of Justice, serving six jurisdictions, also went down, illustrating how shared platforms can spread disruption across governments.
• Citing a Fortinet report, the article says there were roughly 325 million attack attempts across the English-speaking Caribbean in 2025 and critical vulnerabilities were targeted within 24–48 hours of disclosure.
• Citing IBM's 2026 report, it says the mean time to identify and contain a breach rose to 247 days, reversing five years of improvement.
• The author argues that annual supplier assessments can quickly become outdated and miss risks that change faster than the audit cycle.
• Recommended measures include tracking critical remediation against a 48-hour benchmark, gathering continuous supplier evidence, using segmentation and compensating controls, and monitoring federated access.
• The article describes small security teams, limited failover capacity, remote vendor support, and shared decision-making as structural barriers to faster patching.

MITRE ATT&CK

Countries